April 24, 7:45 WBAI 99.5 fm. A check on our progress as American Muslims; and, Lynne Stewart: the Peoples' Lawyer.

See Ramzy Baroud's assessment on how our Muslim community misuses celebrity Muslims as surrogates for their own stuggle.

Monday April 17 WBAI Radio, NYC. Why is there essential no anti-war movement in the USA?

April 10; A critical look at media coverage of the US assault on Syria; and an update on ReclaimNY.

B. Nimri Aziz weekly radio commentary on events around the globe and in the USA. Listen in at 99.5 fm, or online www.wbai.org where we are livestreamed.

"We are more alike than we are different"

Maya Angelou

March 8, Women's Day Radio Specials 10-11 am on WJFF Radio, 90.5 fm, and 11:am on WBAI, 99.5 New York: B. Nimri Aziz interviews director Amber Fares about her new film "Speed Sisters" and exerpts from 2009-2010 interviews with professional women in Syria, Nadia Khost and Nidaa Al-Islam.

As a Black writer, I was expected to accept the role of victim. That made it difficult in the beginning to be a writer. James Baldwin

I often feel that there must have been something that I should’ve done that I didn’t do. But I can’t identify what it is that I didn’t do. That’s the first difficulty. And the second is, what makes you think you’re it?

Harry Belafonte, activist and singer at 89

It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble; It's what you know for sure that just ainst so.

Mark Twain

You can't be brave if you've only had wonderful things happen to you.

Mary Tyler Moore

You can’t defend Christianity by being against refugees and other religions

Pope Francis:

"I don't have to be what you want me to be". Muhammad Ali

"The Secret of Living Well and Longer: eat half, walk double, laugh triple, and love without measure" attributed to Tibetan sources

Articles

Algerian Agricultural Experiments in the Sahara

2006-04-01

by Barbara Nimri Aziz

Soufi from the River, Soufi from the Sand

Who else but we built our domes? Who but we preened these poems? To whom else do sand dunes yield A land aglow with golden jewel? Come, See a rare pride. Come, See how this sand breathes sand; How these brown arms Render harsh earth so supple. How these brown arms Lift away trouble. Come. See, from sun’s hot rays of El-Souf light enters any dark crevice.

Bubakar Murad (Translation: Rachida Mohammedi)

At the entrance to a private experimental farm near the city of El-Oued in the Algerian sahara stands a modest statue of an early settler of this oasis: the ‘rammaal’. He is neither a camel trader nor a herdsman, although El-Oued is home to both. Rimal means sand in ‘arabic’, and rammaal is the humble farmer and sand porter whose muscle and plodding determination made El-Oued’s early date palms grow. Far removed from today’s mechanized farming, this figure, weighed down by the sack of sand on his back, is an evocative regional symbol. Far to the north of ElOued, Algeria’s hills and plains overlook the Mediterranean, from Tlemsen on the western border with Morocco to Annaba bordering Tunisia in the east. Covered by rich loam and fed by seasonal rains, they are Algeria’s most productive agricultural regions, but they comprise only a sliver of a country more than three times the size of Texas. After Sudan, Algeria is the largest country in Africa.

Almost 90 percent of Algeria’s area lies south of the Atlas mountains, where the land ranges from arid stony plain to shifting seas of desert sand. In many of these arid regions, however, the potential for agricultural production exists: they overlie one of the world’s underground water sources, the Continental Intercalaire. This 600,000-square-kilometer (231,600 sq. mi) confined aquifer spreads beneath much of Algeria, Tunisia and Libya; it is second only in size only to the Ogallala aquifer of the central United States.

For decades, the full agricultural potential of Algeria’s inland expanses have been overlooked in favor hydrocarbon exploration, and gas and oil today account for some 60 percent of the Algerian government’s revenues and one-third of Algeria’s gross domestic product. Much of Central and southern Algeria, populated by barely three million of the country’s estimated 32 million people, has remained hardly more than a scattering of oases.

But that is changing. Rural development is receiving increasing official support as the Algerian government recognizes that arid-region production not only helps move Algeria toward food independence, but also helps check the expansion of the desert and staunch the flow of young people from rural to urban areas of the country.